


Day 24. Jolt

by Munnin



Series: Fictober [24]
Category: Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Challenging of said Internalised Homophobia, F/F, Internalized Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 09:12:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16385300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Munnin/pseuds/Munnin
Summary: Savric learns more than he knows how to process about his sister, and is forced to face his own ingrained prejudices.





	Day 24. Jolt

**Author's Note:**

> If you’re just joining in, I urge you to read the [whole series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1145777) from the beginning. Nothing is going to make sense from here without have read the previous stories.

Naboo was beautiful. Breathtakingly so. It reminded Savric of some of the nicer areas of Ec Pand IV. 

Nothing on his home worlds was so casually ornate, so effortlessly charming. The Naboo prized aesthetics, almost over efficiency. Everything here took a little longer to do, luxuriating in the moment of doing something well.

It would have galled Sav just a few weeks ago. Induparans prized austerity, efficiency. Respect was found in discretion and modesty. Their buildings were utilitarian, their cities functional. There was pageantry in the royal court but that had the well-worn edge of tradition. Done because it had always been done.

But Naboo. Naboo wore its heart on its sleeve. It wore its pastel brightness and its elaborate celebrations of life on every surface, for everyone to see. 

The Jedi had wanted him to go to Coruscant. To testify before the Republic Senate that Count Dooku had reprogrammed the droids that had killed so many people. That Count Dooku had twisted his creations into something… else. 

They wanted him to throw himself on the Republic’s mercy and hope he didn’t bounce. 

The thought terrified him. 

He would have faced that assassin again rather than the condemnation of the Republic Senate. To be confronted by the cost of his foolish trust.

Lady Amidala understood. She’d been sympathetic of his reluctance. He’d done his best to manage his emotions, to keep them private, but Lady Amidala was a very perceptive individual and she was kind enough not to call him out for his cowardice. 

So much for the pride of the Induparan Crown Worlds.

He had failed. His people, his world, his family, himself. He had failed the galaxy. He had wanted to save people. Instead he’d handed the Separatists a more efficient weapon with which to kill. 

That was his legacy. 

And it terrified him. 

In the end, it had been Lady Amidala who had offered a solution. 

She had granted Savric refugee status on Naboo, on the condition he work with Republic slicers to reconstruct the base coding for the tactical droids. He would be safer on Naboo too. There were still concerns the assassin might try again. 

Of course, the Republic Security slicers had been more or less useless, unable to follow the algorithms as Savric had written them. Sav had been left to his own devices while the Jedi negotiated with the freelance slicer who had originally cracked his coding. 

Sav couldn’t help but feel a little proud of his code, given how challenging the Republic slicers had found it. He was also curious to meet this Swan Le, the slicer who spoke of coding like it was music. 

And in the meantime, he had a more personal matter to deal with. 

His sister. 

Lady Amidala had been true to her word and had found information regarding Tarika Ishsha. Sav was… unsure how to react when Lady Amidala regretfully informed him Tarika had been killed in battle. 

The dossier she’d provided was brief and confusing. Tarika had not been a Jedi. In fact, it seemed she had failed some major test in her early teens and had been reassigned to other duties.

That made no sense to Sav. How could someone fail to be a Jedi? Wasn’t it a power one was born with? Wasn’t that why the Jedi collected children when they were young?

Tarika had trained as a pilot and become very successful and well respected. She had been a commissioned officer in the Republic Navy. The rest of her record after that was redacted.

And then her file was closed with the notation of her death – she had gone down with her ship somewhere near the outer rim. The name of the ship and the exact location was also redacted. 

What she had been doing there must have been important. Else why would it be redacted?

Or was he simply not to be trusted with the information. A former Separatist. 

Tarika’s file indicated she was married at the time of her death and was survived by her spouse. Something that surprised Sav greatly. Jedi did not marry. Before reading the file, he’d never thought of her as anything but a celibate monastic. 

The idea that she might have loved, had a family... and that her own family, Sav’s parents, knew none of this. 

Sav had put a request through to Lady Amidala, in the hope she would contact Tarika’s husband. 

Perhaps meeting the man his sister had married would help Savric get to know her, who she really was. The woman, not the memory of a memory he had lived with all his life. He had never met his sister, and yet he lived in her shadow. He wanted to understand why – why she wasn’t the legend his parents were so proud of.

The person who he had spent his life trying to live up to in his parent’s eyes.

If he was honest with himself, reading her file made him angry. It had been a lie, everything he’d known about his _hero_ sister. The greater than human Jedi had been nothing more than a pilot. Her death looked noble on paper but only because of that romantically foolish notion of a captain going down with the ship. It seemed… silly to him. 

Tarika had a husband, perhaps a family. Why had she given that up? Why had she let herself die?

Lady Amidala messaged to say Tarika’s spouse had agreed to meet him and Sav found himself pacing, watching for the man’s arrival. 

What would he be like? Another failed Jedi? A crewman in the Republic Navy? Surely not. Weren’t there rules against that?

He was so lost in his thoughts, he nearly didn’t hear the chime of the door and had to rush to answer it. 

The person at the door was short and freckled; a slightly curvy woman perhaps a few years older than Sav. She was dressed in comfortable dun-coloured clothes. 

“Um, can I help you?” Sav asked, confused. She looked like a tradesperson. 

“Savric Ishsha?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Helara Avery, but everyone calls me Hel.” She cocked her head at him. “I was told you were expecting me. You wanted to talk about Tarika? Your sister?” She looked around. “Have I got the right address? You are Savric Ishsha, right?”

“I am.” Sav opened the door slowly. “I was expecting her husband.”

Hel gave him a long look. “Any particular reason you were expecting a man?”

“Because her file said she was married.” Sav stated flatly, still confused. “Lady Amidala arranged for me to meet her husband.”

“Oh brother.” Hel muttered under her breath. “I’m going to bet Padmé never used the word husband but you heard it anyways.” She pulled a locket from around her neck and opened it. A blue holo-image activated, dull in the warm Naboo sunshine. Two women with their arms around each other. The taller of the two had Sav’s mother’s smile. “I am- I was- Tarika’s wife.

Sav stood there in stunned silence. 

“Look, I get it.” Hel huffed. “Tak said her homeworlds were a bit… stuck in their ways.” She nodded back down the road she’d come up. “How about we take a walk? There’s a nice café down by the lake. I don’t know about you but I could do with a caf.”

Sav swallowed and shook his head. “Forgive me. I was- I’m just a bit surprised, that’s all. I have caf here, if you’d like to come in.” The apartment Lady Amidala lent him had a balcony that overlooked the lake. More private than a café. Not that Sav was ready to admit it, but he was not ready to have this conversation in a public place. “Please, come through.”

She gave him a tight little nod and followed him inside. 

He clattered around the kitchenette, making them caf. Lady Amidala’s aid Yanna made sure there was a good caf machine and a stock of her family’s beans waiting for him but he still couldn’t make it taste as good as it had when she’d made it. 

Hel looked around, taking the immaculate little apartment. “Just moved in or are you a neat-freak?” She asked, utterly lacking in formality. 

“I came here with very few possessions.” Sav answered, a little coldly. 

“Ah. Padmé said you were a refugee. Nice of her to set you up here. Tak and I talked about coming to Naboo when we got leave. Apparently there’s some good hiking trails up in the mountains.” 

The over-familiarity set Sav’s teeth on edge. “I take it you and Lady Amidala are well acquainted?”

“We chatted a bit after she messaged me about you. She seems cool. I like her.”

Gripping the tray a little too tight, Sav lead the way out to the balcony. 

Hel leant over the rail, whistling at the view. “It really is pretty here. I grew up on Chandrila. It’s mostly cities and beach resorts. And Tak spent most of her life on Coruscant. We both liked to get away from civilization when we could.”

Sav poured the caf, just to give himself something to do. Something to hide his discomfort. 

Every time this woman mentioned Tarika by that unfamiliar moniker, Sav felt a jolt of annoyance run though him. Tarika was a noble name. A name with deep history. He hated hearing it truncated with such… flippancy. 

“How did you meet my sister?” He didn’t want to ask but he forced himself. He had invited her here. 

No, that wasn’t true. He had invited Tarika’s husband. 

Hel poured herself a caf, ignoring, or ignorant of the insult Sav had paid her by not pouring hers first. “At the academy.”

“You studied as a Jedi?” He spluttered. This dumpy plain woman was a Jedi?

“Stars, no! Could you imagine me with a lightsabre?” Hel laughed, making whooshing noises. “No, we met at the Republic Naval Academy on Prefsbelt IV. She was done with the Jedi and didn’t want to join the Service Corps. Joining the Navy was her way of finding another option.”

Sav bit his lip, wanting to ask why returning home wasn’t an option but he suspected he already knew the answer.

Taking his silence as a cue to go on, Hel continued. “She was a white-hot pilot with those reflexes of her.” She whistled again, shaking her head. “Tak was amazing to watch. But it was her tactics that made her great. It was like she could see a dog fight in four dimensions in her head. She knew where everyone was and where they were going to be. She could keep a squadron tight as a swarm of wart-hornets. She had a knack for leadership. People followed her because they wanted to, and because they knew she’d get them through, no matter what.”

Hel sniffed and topped off her caf without offering him any, lost in her thoughts. “We fooled around at the Academy. Just casually. A bunch of us all hung out and hooked up as we wanted to. Tak was… I think she was still working things through. The Jedi had left her with some pretty hardcore hang-ups.” She flicked her eyes over Savric. “And then there’s your home-world stuff. She needed time to work out what was right for her and having supportive friends who didn’t judge was good for her.”

Savric gritted his teeth. The frank discussion of his sister’s _romantic entanglements_ made him deeply uncomfortable. Induparans didn’t speak of such things. 

If Hel noticed, she didn’t care. “She got accepted to the Republic Navy War College and I went off to join the Corps of Engineers. We ran into each other a couple of years later and just kinda… clicked. We were married on Alderaan.” She fingered the locket before tucking it back under her shirt. “It would have been our fifth anniversary next week.” 

“I see.” Sav swallowed the last of his caf, tasting a bitterness he knew had nothing to do with the drink. He got up and paced, keeping his back to- no, he couldn’t bring himself to think of her as his sister-in-law. Or his sister’s wife. There wasn’t a comfortable word for it in the lexicon he was used to. 

Hel waited him out, leaning on the rail, enjoying the view and the sunshine. 

“What can you tell me about her death?” 

“Only the basics.” Hel admitted with the guarded edge of someone who knew the file was redacted. “We were on manoeuvres when we were attacked by Separatists. We lost shields and engines pretty early. The Seps wanted... what we had. Captain Tarika Avery gave the order to abandon ship.” She paused to steady her voice. “I know Tak was going to blow the ship. I was ready to die with her but she made one of the clones promise to get me out of there, against my will if necessary. Which it was. He dragged me to his ship, with me kicking and screaming the whole way. We got out just before Tak triggered the self-destruct.” She sniffed and wiped away a tear. 

Sav turned to look at her. For some reason it surprised him to see her cry. He knew not every world valued stoicism but it was still odd to see, even after his own recent break-downs. 

She blew her nose and shrugged, turning to face him. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

“I-” Sav again found himself uncertain how to answer. “I’m not sure.”

“Because of me? Because your sister married a woman?” She hadn’t meant to belittle or challenge him but Sav felt his colour rise all the same. 

He wasn’t sure how to answer her. Because the honest answer was yes. He felt prepared to talk with another man, with his sister’s husband. Because Induparans had protocol for that. And Sav relied on protocol as much as he relied on his cane.

Hel sat her cup down. “Look, I’m staying on Naboo for a week or so. I want to go on one of those hikes she and I never got to. I loved your sister, I’ll love her for the rest of time. I want to share my memories of her so she lives on in others. When you’ve cycled through processing this and worked out what you want to know, comm me okay?”

Sav sat down heavily as Hel let herself out. Head in his hands, Sav wondered if he could get any more out of his depth.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks Josh for being an awesome beta.


End file.
